The recipients of Yunnan province’s annual science and technology leadership awards were announced on August 26, 2014. The award’s ceremony was attended by official party members, members of the provincial people’s congress, university heads, and prominent local businessmen. The Kunming Institute of Zoology (KIZ) was represented by deputy director Ren Lai. KIZ was awarded four awards, including the grand prize in the natural science category, which was awarded to Dr.’s Yaping Zhang, Qingpeng Kong, Dongdong Wu, Minsheng Peng and Chang Sun of KIZ and Yunnan University for their project, “The evolution of genomic diversity in Asian populations.” Two first prizes were also awarded for “Molecular mechanisms of adaptive animal evolution” by Dr.’s Yaping Zhang, Peng Shi, Yongyi Shen, Li Yu, and Dongdong Wu, and “The genetic mechanisms of primate brain evolution and the origins of human intelligence” by Dr.’s Bing Su, Xuebin Qi, Hui Zhang, Hong Shi, Zhixiang Lu, and Rui Zhang.  The third prize was awarded to Dr.’s Liming Shi, Fengtang Yang, Wenhui Nie, Ruiqing Liu, Jinhuan Wang, Weiting Su and Yuze Chen of KIZ for their project “Frozen zoo – the animal genetic resources library establishing and application”

In total one award was granted for outstanding contribution, two labeled grand prize, 12 for first Prize, 44 for second prize, and 132 for third prize.

(By Andrew Willden)